SPACE.com — MESSENGER Flyby of Venus a Dress Rehearsal for Mercury

[groovychk]

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Mercury Messenger flew by Venus yesterday. Hopefully it worked flawlessly and we’ll have a lot of pics and data soon.
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SPACE.com — MESSENGER Flyby of Venus a Dress Rehearsal for Mercury
MESSENGER is expected to collect more than 6 gigabytes of data about the Venus system and take more than 600 images during the 73- hour-flyby. The information will provide new observations about Venus’s atmosphere, cloud structure, space environment, and perhaps even its surface.

During its brief sojourn, MESSENGER will join a European spacecraft, Venus Express, that is currently in orbit around Venus. The two probes will work together to investigate how particles from the Sun’s solar wind affects and controls the upper layers of Venus’s atmosphere.

“By coordinating and comparing these observations, we will be able to maximize the science from both missions and potentially learn things that would not be revealed by one set of observations alone,” said study team member Ralph McNutt, also of APL.

Launched in August 2004, the MEcury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission is the first to visit our solar system’s innermost planet in more than 30 years, ever since NASA’s Mariner 10 mapped about 45 percent of its surface. MESSENGER’s mission is to map the entire planet, as well as gather information about Mercury’s composition and structure, its geologic history, and the makeup of its core and poles.

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I can’t wait to see the pictures from this. I’ve never been real happy with the lack of visible-light hi-res pics of Venus.